Aeronautics and Aircraft Engineering Centre

The Aeronautics and Aircraft Engineering Centre at Perth College UHI has interests across aviation, aerospace and beyond. With a strong undergraduate curriculum focussing on aircraft operations and design it has a range of experienced staff and industry-standard facilities to support research and consultancy activities.

Current areas of activity include:

Flight simulation

Gas-turbine performance

Motorsport aerodynamics

Wind tunnel testing and test techniques

Materials and design for manufacture

Aero-acoustics.

The growth and evolution of the aviation industry and an increasing environmental awareness mean that future aircraft design and operations will provide new challenges. The requirements of a modern engineer are moving away from practitioners of stove-piped disciplines to problem-solving analysts on multi-disciplinary projects. Our goal then is to provide our graduates with these transferrable skills and to put them into practice in collaboration with industry.

This philosophy has led to our involvement in the application of aerospace tools, methods and techniques in non-aerospace industries such as oil and gas, renewable energy and transport.

Our members of staff combine considerable industry experience with significant expertise which enables them to understand customer requirements and constraints and thereby shape solutions that are fit-for-purpose and delivered in a professional manner. Our physical facilities, which include a gas-turbine rig, a flight simulator and wind tunnels, are complemented by numerical modelling capability, such as Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), which in turn are underpinned by modern Computer Aided Design tools including AutoCAD and CATIA.

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